Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Matt, thanks so much for joining us.
Matt Walker, Simon Data
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
I'm excited to talk to you because Simon Data is one of the fastest-growing companies in the whole marketing tech stack. And your tagline is unlock the power of your customer data. So let's get into the weeds like what is Simon Data do?
Matt Walker, Simon Data
Yeah, so Simon is a pretty elaborate system. It's both a customer data platform and an Integrated Marketing Cloud that we call a Smart Hub. So we're integrating customer data from behavioral event streams from data warehouses, first-party vendors, and we're producing that unified customer profile, so that we can actually use it for marketing purposes. And so that means that we're putting it through segmentation. We're feeding it into our Smart Hub. And we're doing campaign orchestration, cross channel marketing, coordination, and using channels like email, push notifications, SMS, custom audience products, web hooks, data feeds, and a lot more.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So Matt, talk about the founding story of Simon Data, like, how did the idea come to fruition?
Matt Walker, Simon Data
Yeah, so Simon is really Jason Davis our CEO, brainchild, but it was born of experiences that we actually shared while building out the data platform for Etsy, which is the place we were before Simon. And what we saw there is that it was extremely powerful to democratize data, especially for product analytics and data science. But we noticed that marketing wasn't sort of getting the same value from those data platforms that the other functions were. And really Simon is our approach to solving that problem in bringing that data to marketing, empowering them to take advantage of it and then to use it to actually optimize their campaigns.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So do you have a customer example to share that and how they use it?
Matt Walker, Simon Data
Yeah, absolutely. So we work with a very, very wide range of customers from small digitally native businesses like Canary or Vino to the sort of more upper mid-market ones like Barkbox, as well as very large organizations like Esos, TripAdvisor and JetBlue. But a fun example of the sophistication of cross-channel coordination comes from another customer called Freshly. And so what they were trying to do is really stitch together, their marketing and their customer support experiences. And so what they did was they actually consumed behavioral webhooks from Twilio an SMS channel, and detected whether or not those messages contain the word stop. So if they contain the word stop, then they're adding the contact to an opt-out list and preventing us from messaging them again in the future. But if it doesn't, you have an end-user who's actually trying to communicate with the company on an SMS thread. And so what we do is we actually use Simon's integration into Zendesk to create a support ticket and have a human actually reach out and talk to that user and say, Hey, what's going on on this thread?
Keith Cline, VentureFizz 2:59
Wow. Okay. So yeah, that's very sophisticated. That's it, there's a lot going on. And just as a consumer, how I'm engaging with companies and brands, now, it is, you know, multi-channel, so it's, you know, email, and then I'm starting to get more and more text messages. And I find the text messages super helpful. If it's personalized. It's something that I want at the right time, that engages me to hopefully buy something, which I know is their end goal. But if I'm the consumer that and getting that message to me that's personalized, I feel like they're actually adding value.
Matt Walker, Simon Data
Yeah, precisely, it's just, it's incredibly important that it be personalized. And the way to do that is through having a very, very rich customer profile, where we essentially know all about your behavior, all about your actual user attributes, and can really put that data in the right place at the right time. And in the broader thing that Simon is trying to do is just add marketing into this seamless user experience. So you really want to, you know, really be speaking to the person directly. And in a way that resonates with them, regardless of whether it's in the product or through your marketing message.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So what's the current stage of the company? Like how many employees do you have? How much funding Have you raised? whatever else you can share?
Matt Walker, Simon Data
Yeah, so we're rapidly growing Series D, we have about 130 people. And we work with approximately 60 brands across a wide variety of industries, with a variety of business models at different stages and of different sizes. But really, they're all tied together by really wanting to unlock their data to power marketing and drive this seamless customer experience.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
As far as growth plans ahead, hiring, where do you expect the growth to happen there?
Matt Walker, Simon Data
Absolutely yeah, we're hiring across the business. But within engineering, we're hiring for full-stack and back end roles. And we're really looking to, you know, grow the team out commensurate with the business growing and with the size of the platform growing, we have a lot of functionality. And so if you're an engineer who really wants to solve hard problems, we have Many to solve. So there's just a lot of opportunity to come in and do really interesting engineering work at Simon right now.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now, once someone does join the team, what's it like working at Simon Data? Like, what's the culture like?
Matt Walker, Simon Data
Yeah, so our culture is really represented through our core values of respect everyone listen and share, take ownership, learn and develop and build strategically. And when you combine those where there is a high bar for hiring, it means that the people you're working with are quite impressive and a pleasure to work with. So our entire company is distributed at the moment, but engineering was pre-pandemic, and is going to remain so ever after to have a very strong remote culture, and learned a lot of lessons and keeping remote engineers connected, engaged, and productive.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So there's a lot of opportunities out there, the job market is very active, which is a good thing. So why is now the ideal time to join Simon Data?
Matt Walker, Simon Data
Yeah, so I mean, just looking back on all that we've done at, Simon, I'm completely blown away by how far we've come as a team as a product as a company, really gone from, you know, an idea in Jason's head to a successful well funded and surprisingly large startup that's really positioned to shape the market that we're in. But the work is far from done. There are so many features, you have to build, like so many systems to design so many processes to solidify and infrastructure to optimize. It's just an incredibly exciting and energetic time to be at Simon because there's so much going on. And, and since we're we're not there yet, but there's still more to do, we're still growing product and process isn't fully solidified, it's really an opportune time to step in and leave your mark on Simon. So we're solving very challenging problems with very sophisticated technology. And I need my engineers to pave the way and drive the whole company forward.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Well, if you are interested in exploring opportunities at Simon Data, you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz which you'll see all their job listings. It's venturefizz.com/simondata. And as Matt alluded to, to make this platform successful, there's a lot that needs to happen behind the scenes. So it's an ideal time to join a company that has a great foundation, but a lot more to go in terms of growth for the future. So go to their company page and make sure you're applying to one of their jobs. Matt, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the great things happening at the company.
Matt Walker, Simon Data
Absolutely. It was a lot of fun.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
